Sara Legg
Camera things It is interesting how different environments of interpretation – the people, places and things that collide to make meaning – create for me an entirely new object, from an object I felt quite familiar with since childhood. The object I’m talking about is a disposable camera. It isn’t just that the ‘meaning’ of the camera that changes as I change environments, but the actual object that is a camera – it’s ‘thingness’– changes in relations to other things, if we take for granted that all things are in relation. My team at Quicksand had ordered a box of ten disposable cameras at my insistence that we try to use them in an upcoming field research trip to South Sudan. Unfortunately the cameras arrived a few days after my team had departed, so I thought what better way to make use of these cameras than to take them to the UnBox Caravan. My understanding of the disposable camera became complicated first when going through security at the airport while on my way to Ahmedabad. The box with the cameras was removed from the security conveyor belt and a security staff member asked what was in it. When I told her it was a box of cameras she looked at me blankly, before opening the parcel to inspect it. She pulled one small cardboard rectangle out, looked at it in disbelief, and proceeded to open one individual camera. I repeated that it’s a camera while another curious security guard joined her. She didn’t believe me, claimed the box was much too small to have a camera inside, and unwrapped the protective foil around the disposable camera. I repeated that it was a camera, but it never registered. At no point does she look at the camera with a nod or offer any other kind of acknowledgment that would suggest she knew what she was looking at. And so the camera in all its thingness has bubbled up into something else. Is it the camera that changes for me or is it the security guard? Both? Is it insightful anymore to describe experiences as mediated? I’m now recalling Ian Hacking’s comment on the observation that something that is socially constructed is not very impressive. During the second day of the caravan the participants were asked to come up with ideas to pursue and prototype for the remaining week and a half. I noticed a lot of them walking around the first couple of days snapping photos of shops and people, and especially children. As a facilitator wanting to instigate further exploration among groups, I suggested a common research method, cultural probes. Cultural probes are essentially objects chosen participants interact with – and this interaction informs and illuminates a design question to varying degrees. For me, there wasn’t time to make thoughtful, skilful, even rigorous ‘cultural